Surface coatings play a major role in our lives. They include paints, adhesives, and sealants, among many others. They are often used for decoration and protection of surfaces. These coatings typically utilize properties of adhered films with bulk thicknesses. With reference to metals, corrosion is deterioration of essential properties in a material due to reactions with its environment. In metals and metal alloys, corrosion begins with the loss of an electron and is described as an electrochemical process (Jones, Denny, 1996, Principles and Prevention of Corrosion, 2nd edition, Upper Saddle River, N.J., Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-359993-0). Existing coatings, such as traditional paints and polymer coatings typically have thickness measured in tens of microns to ensure complete coverage of the metal surface and adequate adhesion properties. Due to the importance of coatings, significant efforts have been devoted to fabricate them with thicknesses less than 100 micrometers. Common thin film fabrication methods include spin-coating and polymer brushes. Spin-coating (Weill, A. & Dechenaux, E., 1998, The spin-coating process mechanism related to polymer solution properties. Polymer Engineering and Science 28, 945-948) can reliably create films with thicknesses down to 200 nm while polymer brushes are useful for growing films that are about 10-500 nm thick (Dyer, D. J., Feng, J., Schmidt, R., Wong, V. N., Zhao, T. & Yagci, Y., 2004, Photoinduced polymerization from dimethylamino-terminated self-assembled monolayers on gold. Macromolecules 37, 7072-7074). Such bulky thickness is not practical when coatings are needed in confined spaces and the chemical components of such coatings may leach out of the coating into the environment. Accordingly, there is a need for nanothin insulating robust coatings to address these issues and provide a superior corrosion protection.